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"We will learn to think of ourselves, our personalities, as an orchestra of chemical voices in our heads," predicts Arnold Mandell, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego. "Psychiatry will become the most scientifically precise of medical specialties, relying not at all on subjective judgment." Jack Barchas, professor of psychopharmacology at Stanford, thinks the current exploits of his field are on a par with Einstein's revolutionary formulation E = mc². Says he: "The discovery of the neuroregulators may prove as important to humanity as that equation. We are on the edge of a new era." Also a Brave New World of mind-controlling drugs. Before long, according to some researchers, it will be possible to inject or extract chemicals to get almost any desired behavior, good or ill.
Undoubtedly, these rapidly opening biochemical avenues will place awesome powers in the hands of psychiatrists. The prospective drugs of the future could, of course, be used to create a Huxleian nightmare. But, in capable hands and under public scrutiny, they need not. At the very least, the drugs may give psychiatry the bold new tools that will enable it to shake off its own current depression and fulfill the high hopes that Freud and his followers correctly held out for it.